hplusmag - winter 2009 - cover "Hi there, Ray"

Parijata Mackey wrote an article for the Winter 2009 h+ magazine about diybio titled “diybio: a growing movement takes on aging.” She provides an overview of diy -hardware, -software, and -wetware, and gives shoutouts to some of the projects listed at diybio.org/projects (man we gotta develop a better system for collecting projects).  Overall she provides an overview of where diybio came from and where it’s going in an optimistic manner consistent with h+. She also provides tantalizing interview coverage with John Schloendorn concerning his DIY SENS lab and biotech co-working space in the Bay Area.

Andrew Hessel wrote another article called “Why DIY Bio” in which he explains his vision, based on open source & synthetic biology principles, for a distributed, open anti-cancer research collective. He calls it Pink Army.

UPDATE: slashdotted on 26 Jan 2010.

Scientific American Oct 1953 - Evolution in Bacteria

DIYbio aims to be “the institution for the amateur,” developing and providing access to all of the resources a professional might have and an amateur might want, such as equipment, protocols, access to literature, etc. And we are collectively doing so in a distributed fashion right now.

But we are also doing something more, something that will occur slowly, over long time-scales. We are helping lay the foundations for cultural shift. We are laying the foundations for broad, deep, domestic understanding of science and technology.

We are proving that the cultural barriers to practice science in general, and biotechnology in particular, are imaginary. We are proving this by doing it ourselves. We are building a familiarity with the practice and product of science and slowly demonstrating that it can be a cultural activity like musicianship or cooking or solving sudoku puzzles. We are domesticating biotechnology.

As Sophia Roosth recently pointed out, we are proving that “the biological is not something cordoned-off in labs, but something quotidian, personal, and apprehensible,” that we are “intentionally destabilizing what it means to ‘do science’.”

Why is the domestication of biotechnology important? Listen to how W. Brian Arthur begins his recent book, The Nature of Technology:

We are attuned in the deepest parts of our being to nature, to our original surroundings and our original condition as humankind. We have a familiarity with nature, a reliance on it that comes from three million years of at-homeness with it. We trust nature. When we happen upon a technology such as stemcell regenerative therapy, we experience hope. But we also immediately ask how natural this technology is. And so we are caught between two huge and unconscious forces: Our deepest hope as humans lies in technology; but our deepest trust lies in nature. These forces are like tectonic plates grinding inexorably into each other in one long, slow collision. The collision is not new, but more than anything else it is defining our era. Technology is steadily creating the dominant issues and upheavals of our time. We are moving from an era where machines enhanced the natural—speeded our movements, saved our sweat, stitched our clothing—to one that brings in technologies that resemble or replace the natural—genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, medical devices implanted in our bodies. As we learn to use these technologies, we are moving from using nature to intervening directly within nature. And so the story of this century will be about the clash between what technology offers and what we feel comfortable with.

By domesticating biotechnology, we are helping society temper its natural mistrust of technology.

DIYbio is just one stone in this cultural foundation, set next to other DIY communities and Citizen Science projects and part of the broader resurgence of DIY culture championed by publications such as MAKE, President Obama, and perhaps the forebears of the internet itself.

Overview: DIYbio 2 & 3 were focused on gel electrophoresis – we started by researching all the amateur gel protocols we could find online (notably the MacGuyver Project and the MAKE protocol, the latter of which we decided to focus on) and making a shopping list of materials we would need to build the complete gel apparatus, make a gel, and stain DNA. We got Agar agar powder from a health food store on ebay and Potato Dextrose Agar and sybr green from a lab equipment reseller on ebay.

Basically we over-stained the gels with methylene blue and couldn’t visualize anything because the entire gel was a solid blue.

Also, we used metals that were way too reactive as electrodes in the gel box and the redox reaction that they enjoyed probably ruined the voltage field across the gel.

That said, I think we accomplished a lot, learned a lot, and somehow managed to do everything the protocol required in a spontaneous, parallel way – to me, that was the best part about the event. I remember stepping back at one point and being amazed at how well everyone was working together without any central plan: Topher and Jason were improvising with the stovetop and microwave to boil the agar, Sophia and Mike were cutting up charlie cards to make gel combs, and Benny, Ricardo, and the nublabs crew were constructing and taping gel trays and boxes. It was awesome.

What I learned: 1. We were not as rigorous with the materials as we needed to be. One of our main problems was getting the concentration of the gel just right, which was difficult because the packages for our agar didn’t list the original concentrations. In general, we followed the MAKE protocol too specifically while using supplies that came with ambiguous descriptions at best. DIYbio protocols we develop should be designed to help the user understand the basic principles of the operation in a way that enables them to improvise successfully with non-standard materials.

1. We should have had a solid understanding of how to dispose of all the materials involved before beginning as well as exactly what the potential risks involved were (very low – probably the biggest risk was spilling molten agar) and what to do in case something went wrong.

2. It would have been better to have built all the equipment in one meeting and then used it in a second. Trying to do both was a little too long.

Next week we are going on a tour of the Boston FabLab, courtesy of our friends at NubLabs – meet at the FabLab at 7:00pm on Thursday, 17 July 2008.

See you then!

Mac

p.s. go comment on the flickr photos!